Thursday, 23 January 2014

Most of the machines in various institutes and organizations are set up behind a NAT router and thus, they are allocated with a private IP address, either manually or by the DHCP server.To the outer world, your (public) IP address is same as that of the NAT router. There are many techniques with which you can detect the public IP address of your machine. This mini-article will be helpful to you to know the public IP address of your NAT router using Terminal.

You would be taking help of an external web server in order to detect your public IP address. So, make sure that your system is connected to internet. As you are dependent on that particular web server, you need to have curl installed in our system.

If you don't have curl installed, just enter following command:

For Ubuntu, Linux Mint or other Debian based systems:

sudo apt-get install curl

For Fedora, CentOS or other RHEL based systems:

sudo yum install curl

Once this is done, you can use any of the following commands listed below to get your public IP address. You can run them in terminal or you can also use them in bash scripts. Here is the list: